(n.) A forked tool used by clothiers in dressing cloth.
(n.) To dress with, or as with, a preen; to trim or dress with the beak, as the feathers; -- said of birds.
(n.) To trim up, as trees.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
(2) His running here was unstinting and he doubled his tally with a clinical finish after a first touch too smart for Pogatetz, preening perhaps after giving Boro a sniff of reprieve.
(3) Having started out preening (he tells a former colleague that he lives "the life of Riley"), he ends up howling alone on a small rock, the decision to adorn himself with a beautiful young wife having stolen his stature, robbed him of his dignity.
(4) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
(5) He remembers Obama's incoming cabinet posing for portraits in the White House during the height of the crisis: “what a weird and preening thing for us to do while the world is burning”.
(6) 'Jonathan Saunders, Preen, Berardi, Kane and JW Anderson are on fire' Those are the names you will be raving about now.
(7) Romney's event is being organised by Scott Preen, a London company that specialises in high-profile political fundraising parties.
(8) If the Packham show emphasised a disconnect between the fashion industry's quest for trends and pure red carpet dressing, then the Preen show later in the day underlined how a move to the US can give a British label a healthy dollop of slickness.
(9) At best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless: preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
(10) Total lipid was extracted from chicken (Gallus domesticus) epidermis, leg scale, claws, feathers and preen glands and analyzed by quantitative thin-layer chromatography.
(11) Comparatively higher activity was observed in the extent of ambulation and rearing at 5 weeks old, rearing and preening at 7 weeks old, and preening and defecation at 11 weeks old in the Sprague-Dawley rats compared with the Wistar rats.
(12) In his preening, know-it-all professional arrogance, Cruise thinks he's bulletproof, but the mouse roars, and the hitman pays (incidentally, when casting a soullessly efficient, emotionally unavailable professional, could there be a more perfect candidate than Cruise?).
(13) The animals showed depressed response of preening on day 2 and 6.
(14) In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
(15) Trichobilharzia ocellata cercariae attach readily to the foot skin of their duck host, but poorly to preen-gland contents.
(16) Jane, a journalist in her 40s, thinks so: "I won't stay long in the weights room," she says: "The men are preening themselves.
(17) In the short-term, times spent feeding, drinking and preening decreased.
(18) Daily decrease was observed in ambulation, rearing and preening responses, with maximum decrement on the seventh day of Dimecron intoxication.
(19) From day 9, the preening response exhibited a continuous increasing pattern until the last day of the experiment.
(20) Power is meaningless unless it’s displayed, enacted: hence Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested preening or his sessions of bone-crushing judo .
Primp
Definition:
(a.) To be formal or affected in dress or manners; -- often with up.
Example Sentences:
(1) And beautiful Beyoncé tells us that since becoming a mother, she eschews big primping routines, opting for "no make-up, just sunglasses and lip gloss".
(2) My hair really does look like a football helmet.” In an otherwise chaotic universe, their primping and styling remains the constant to which they can always turn.
(3) And it strikes me: this is almost cooking as couture, backstage behind the catwalk as fantastical creations are pinned and primped into shape.
(4) The hotel is being primped and hoovered, the security is arriving, the press is nowhere to be seen, and I just had a really boring crab salad.
(5) He resented the way women primped themselves before coming on the show, so they all looked alike and he could not tell the black pudding stringers from the knitting needle knobbers; and he disliked the certificate challengers were given to say they had beaten the panel, thinking it encouraged evasive replies to questions.
(6) Not the comparatively ancient generation that once produced Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera, but the new breed, who are primped and propagated like prize roses; toothy munchkins given TV shows and then slapped on backpacks, pencil cases and, if they can carry a tune without significant wobble, album covers.
(7) From now on, space and air would be shaped and primped by the private sector.
(8) What we put in our piscine, Is called polymethyl hexabiguanide, It acts with the aid of hydrogen peroxide, To keep our piscine quite pristine..." Hearing John sing this one night in his pleasant tenor voice, as the moonlight glinted off a perfectly placid and primped pool, was one of the great musical experiences of my life.
(9) By day he rests and reads a little; by night he comes alive, a vampire in a linen suit, throwing great raves for primped and preened pals in his penthouse.